fedi 4chan?

Any place with anonymous/ephermal account and posts as the default is going to attract the worst people in the world....

ie. topic boards with ephemeral linear message threads

This describes a general forum format, but you might mean chan imageboards specifically. There have been federated imageboards for a while, but they're very niche and experimental and I don't see the value. The two examples I've heard of are NNTPchan (2015-present, NNTP protocol) and Fchannel (ActivityPub protocol).

There's the related imageboard webring, but there's no actual federated interaction between the boards, it's effectively just cross-advertising to allow easier discovery.

If they are anonymous, they would get defederated extremely quickly.

IIRC, someone was talking about their p2p text only 4chan clone recently. I forget what it was called though.

Edit: found it.

https://github.com/plebbit/plebchan

Probably if you called it "fedi imageboard" it wouldn't get such a negative reaction.

Anyplace that allows, or in the case of 4chan, encourages purely Anon posting is going to be a cesspit. When there's no accountability, no ID of any sort (even a screen name) to tie actions against then there's no reputation to protect. It might be pleasant at first, but you can bet it won't stay that way for long.

Well... Lemmy?

4chan's style as a concept doesn't work too well with the concepts of the rest of the fediverse. There's no benefit to federating anonymous image and text posts across multiple servers and merging those feeds together. Especially if the content is meant to be ephemeral, why are you wasting bandwidth replicating it? Hell, with the average lemmy server's replication delay the original content would be gone before it could replicate anywhere.

There'd also be no reason for each "instance" to not be its own separate entity with no federation. It's not like 4chan really does crossposting between boards, you just can link between them.

Also, having spent far more time on the chans than is in any way healthy, there still isn't any real solution for good or consistent moderation. Federation doesn't inherently make moderation better or easier, if anything it complicates things in that regard.

Edit, additional info: Certain threads on /vg/ have been dealing with their own thread specific trolls for literal years with no mod action. Some of the threads have figured out rough schedules of mods based off what type of shit gets removed and when.

Federation is not a magical pill for better quality. I direct you to explodingheads, or plenty of other examples of shit instances documented by fediseer.

How would you federate something ephemeral? I'll admit I don't understand the specific techinals of federation but what stops another platform from hosting your content locally after it has supposed to have been deleted? It seems like the two goals of the platforms are diametrically opposed

Make one if you want that. I doubt many adults are going to make a 4chan clone and deal with all that comes with it.

No offense. I’m just saying 4chan is toxic and bad and and there’s not a lot of experienced developers hoping to recreate it when we can just take a shit on the sidewalk and accomplish more in less time.

!comicstrips@lemmy.world has a few ephemeral posters recently

I think there is quite some overlap with Lemmy. You can do images and threads here. And they even show up in a tree-like structure. I'm not sure about ephermal, I don't think Lemmy is as advanced. But other Fedi software have ephemeral posts.

So, given your requirements, I'd say this is that place. Communities would be your topic boards, and posts would be the threads. And user accounts and moderation would be the improvements to make it less toxic.

Activitypub is user based, it's not built to support anonymous accounts.